Facebook Fan Pages are a great way to build your brand, remain Top of Mind. engage with your customers and now Facebook are about to improve their functionality even more.

Yesterday, I read this message from Chris Smith about Facebook's plans to roll out one-to-one email capability for Facebook Fan Pages.

"Just Announced via Mari Smith: Facebook will begin to allow one to one messages to be sent from a Facebook Business Page to anyone who Likes the page. So for example, if you have 1,000 fans you could technically now email them via Facebook. This is monumental in my opinion as most people did not Like Pages knowing they would get messages from them, even one to one messages. Will this cause a mass unliking of Pages that suck? You betcha! Could even cause anyone on the fence to completely leave Facebook all together. I know their are Pages I liked years ago that if I now started getting emails from them I would be very upset. How do you all feel about this it literally just broke?"

So what this means is that you will soon be able to connect with your Fans via email, which is great news for Facebook Page Admins who are also good at marketing because it provides another way to connect with your fans.

But, WARNING: it's also a Kamakazi (Crash & Burn) Marketing Tool for admins who think it's a great idea to start spamming fans with poorly thought out email notifications.

Personally, I really like the idea that it will enable my FB fans to email me if they want to ask me a question privately rather than posting a comment publicly on my wall.

Plus, maybe (just maybe) send a Thank You message to each new fan for joining in individually (BUT even the message within that email would need to be very carefully constructed because it's normally so early within the relationship).

This new functionality could also provide an opportunity for FB Fan Page admins to individually notify competition winners and/or notify existing fans that they are in the running to win any new competitions (as a Value-Add) that the Page administrator may be conducting from time to time in an effort to entice more NEW fans to join their page.

Beyond that, at this stage I can't see any other instance where I'd use this functionality personally...BUT I know for sure that some Facebook Fan Page Admins are going to misuse this new function and stuff up big time.

I think this is great for individuals or businesses using Facebook Fan Pages but be warned...if placed into the wrong hands or misused, it could dissolve your Facebook fan base very quickly.

Interested to hear what the B2 community thinks about this latest update on Facebook?

- Business 2